October - my favorite month of the year

[GeoffR]

I don't read many new releases, but I'm looking forward to Paul McAuley's Austral (Science fiction) and Pierre Lemaitre's Rosy and John (Crime fiction) in the next month.

[BookCat]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I've never quite understood what qualifies as a "beach read," myself (assuming of course that the plot of said book doesn't actually unfold on a beach). Your stipulation about reading it in the garden means that it's not entirely dependent upon the place where the book gets read. I guess I've just always assumed it meant "long(ish) buzz-generating fiction."

For me a "beach read" is a novel set in a sunny location, with an element of romance, light and easy to read. It can be read on a beach, or on holiday, where there are lots of distractions because it tends to be undemanding.

The types mentioned by others are what I would call aeroplane books, which do tend to be throwaway blockbusters whose purpose is to take your mind off the flight.

But I've read Dracula and Frankenstein while lying in a sunny garden, so I'm not particularly fussy as long as the sun is shining, it's warm and there's a cat somewhere near.

[BelleZora]

I'm looking forward to Two Kinds of Truth (Harry Bosch #20) by Michael Connelly, due out Oct. 31.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by BookCat

I'm strictly a summer person. I love lying outside in the sun absorbing lots of vit d, rather than relying on pills, reading about desert islands, romance, and far away sunny places. Cyd, one of my cats, rolls beside me and really does want his tummy rubbed.

I bought a bean bag last summer to lean on while reading. That purchase ended the sunny weather!
You can keep autumn and winter with its dull grey days. All the pre-Christmas releases are about winter and snow and Christmas.

Bah Humbug!

Give me a beach read in a summer garden.

Summer gardens here in Texas have a high around 40 C. Autumn gardens are a little cooler. . .

[Dr. Drib]

What I have on pre-order for the month of October:

Dark Blood - Louis Guilloux


“Considered a masterpiece by Gide, Malraux, Camus, and Pasternak, Guilloux’s 1935 Blood Dark remains the least known in English of France’s twentieth-century blockbuster novels. Guilloux breaks with the tidiness of traditional French fiction to provide a hallucinatory—and tragicomic—vision of a single day in the life (and death) of a small port town in Brittany during the mutinous and revolutionary year of 1917. At the heart of this apocalyptic satire lies the outsize figure of Cripure, a nihilistic highschool teacher of philosophy, a monstrous Ahab of the intellect suicidally in quest of his Nietzschean white whale. Guilloux’s Le Sang noir here emerges afresh—and urgent—in this new translation by Laura Marris.” —Richard Sieburth

“We come upon Blood Dark with something of a shock. For here is a novel projected in the grand style of the nineteenth century, a mountain of a novel, sprawling . . . out of which there emerges a great tragic figure.” —Harold Strauss, The New York Times

[BookCat]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Summer gardens here in Texas have a high around 40 C. Autumn gardens are a little cooler. . .

In rainy old England things are generally cold and grey.